


Cut The Black Wire

by TeratoCybernetics



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Mindfuck, Profanity, Sloppy Makeouts, generic veilstuck, huge bitch bluh bluh, maybe she learns a thing, psychic hate-off, psychic shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-07
Updated: 2011-11-07
Packaged: 2017-10-25 19:15:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/273809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TeratoCybernetics/pseuds/TeratoCybernetics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is my first fic in <i>years</i>, the first I've finished, and the first time writing second person, EVER. Please be gentle.</p><p>'He is so intent on going over his work that he doesn’t even notice you wrapping your mind around his, sending tendrils through it, disabling his motor functions and cutting off his voice.</p><p>When Sollux does notice, he fights like a surprised beast, and fuck, he is as strong as any bred pilot should be, but you’ve had practice. You know where to push and to pull and push <i>harder</i>, where he’s spent his sweeps trying to block out the voices in his head with code, hiding from them and the power they represent. He is subdued only barely after some moments, but then again, it’s not an easy win that you’re looking for, here.'</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Be Vriska Serket:

Be Vriska, trapped in a shitty laboratory complex pasted to the side of a shitty fucking asteroid, in orbit with the moons and their fragments, myriad other shitty fucking asteroids from paradox space, all twirling around the Scratch itself, a whitehot slash across space bigger than anything any of you had ever seen, among the last twelve of your kind and four stupid, grubsquishy pink aliens.

  
You? Are bored.

  
If your grubtop is to be believed, with or without all the time fuckery, it has been close to three sweeps since it tore open the sky above your home and dumped all your dead game-mates back in your lap and kept you in this disappointment of a fucking denouement like a goldfish in a receptacle. You honestly don’t know if it has felt like that long, your perception of time has been less than reliable since any number of things, up to and including your death, but at the same time, your eyes-your restored eyes-tell you that everyone around you has been growing up, and there's probably not enough room for all of you, here.

  
After the first week, then the first perigee, all of you waited with breathless dread for this to be a temporary thing, for the orbit to decay, for all the spheres to go spinning into the tear in reality. You partied like anyone your age would when presented with what you thought was certain death-real death, this time. When this didn't happen, you partied some more, alchemiting a mountain of crap snacks and squeezefruit wine and something the humans called beer that smelled awful but had made you giggle and your head swim, made it a brilliant idea to tackle John and kiss him, awkwardly, until you realized he was trying to get away, that his mouth was bleeding from your sharp little teeth, and at least three people were ready to fucking deck you or worse.

  
The alchemiter kept you all fed, watered, clothed as you grew through your final moults. How many depended on how much growing there was left to do for each individual. You only had one more full go, and that had been bad enough, an itching and an animalistic sharpening of all of your senses until you couldn’t stand even seeing anyone else for at least three weeks. Gamzee went through three, stopped speaking except in snarls and growls, and ate everything in sight for three whole perigees as he shot up to half again his starting height and more. He had to trade his chosen quarters for somewhere he could fit through the door without hurting his horns on the doorway when he forgot to duck. Everyone had been concerned that his more murderous tendencies would make another appearance, to the point of setting him up in a whole other building until he settled down. The seadwellers underwent all of theirs in a network of pools they had found, only emerging from the self-imposed isolation when they were finished, still spitting mad at one another even after all that time alone, but poised and polished and sleeker than ever.

  
In comparison, the humans changed little. They grew a bit and got hairier, the males’ voices deepening some. The females smell different for some days out of the perigee, more interesting in a way, but you haven’t been arsed to find out why. Fucking weird mammalian creatures.

  
Now? Everyone seems to have settled into an odd little community. John and Karkat have been working on the problems of continuing the species, along with Kanaya’s understanding of the mother grubs and what remained of the matriorb. Jade works on the possibility of escape from the Veil, problems of physics, time and space. Equius fixes things around the labs, builds new ones as needed. Even fucking Nepeta and Tavros prove useful, hunting and cooking pest animals to preserve grist for other things. Everyone fell into some kind of role, something to keep them occupied, to make themselves valuable.

  
You? You seem to have few skills that can be bent to the problem of continuing anyone’s species. Decidedly the opposite, in fact. You are so fucking bored that if Jack showed his glowing green bonebulge around here again you would cheerfully go for him with nothing but your teeth and claws, just to let off some of this inferno you've been biting back for so very long now. You're waxing black as hell for absolutely anyone who will give you a chance, an opening. You have all this pent-up fucking hate and frustration, and everyone around you is too busy doing _important things_ to do anything but deflect or ignore you.

  
Except the little yellow one.

  
Wandering the complex and fuming on all of this for the millionth fucking time, you stop outside his room, the warren of servers glowing softly honey-coloured within, you remember he’s not little anymore. He’s taller than you, maybe the tallest here other than that indigo freak, and has been even more of an antisocial fuckwit since returning from the dead and shedding several layers of himself. Yes, dying is likely to change you and all, but it’s like the pointing object has been rammed even further up his nook than ever, maybe joined by a couple of its friends.

  
You watch him typing, and thinking, stretching his bony arms with a crack and a pop, and typing a little more. He’s so involved in whatever the fuck he’s coding, even after stopping again to inspect the lines of what is, to you, mostly gibberish, that he’s pulled off the bicolour glasses, and is squinting at the screen without them. They glow at you in the hivelight like they hold a residue of his power simply by contagion, and you feel an idea coming, bringing with it a slow and wicked smile- _how haven’t you thought of this until just now?_. He is so intent on going over his work that he doesn’t even notice you wrapping your mind around his, sending tendrils through it, disabling his motor functions and cutting off his voice.

  
When Sollux does notice, he fights like a surprised beast, and fuck, he is as strong as any bred pilot should be, but you’ve had practice. You know where to push and to pull and push _harder_ , where he’s spent his sweeps trying to block out the voices in his head with code, hiding from them and the power they represent. He is subdued only barely after some moments, but then again, it’s not an easy win that you’re looking for, here.

  
You cross the room, turn the swivel-chair to sit astride the skinny hacker, chuckling slightly at his reflexive twitch away from this contact, the hissing growl that escapes him as you press closer, close enough that you can feel his warmth rivalling the servers’. He’s not the fragile, hollowboned thing you’d always imagined. His frame is all tightly coiled wire and bony edges. It’s almost impressive; he might actually be able to give you a run now, all psychic bullshit aside.

  
“Fish-girl’s been putting you through your paces, huh?” You whisper into his ear, grinning harder at how your breath there makes him squirm, as you wind your mind more tightly around his, take control of his hands and bring them up twitching to rest on your thighs. “You know, I kind of hope your princess finds us like this. It’d make life so much more interesting.”

  
“Wh-what the ffuck do you want, Vriska?” A ghost of a question, and seeing the laser fury in his eyes is something like satisfaction. You sniff, lean back a little as if thinking, and then come in close again.

  
“Something to do.” A lick along the edge of his ear making him shiver again, then you nip it hard enough to draw blood, just for emphasis.


	2. Chapter 2

**Be Sollux Captor.**

You’ve set up your quarters close to a main artery of the complex, close to where everyone else has to walk to get to and from the communal room, under the pretense that the servers should be near where they will be needed. And that isn’t precisely a lie, it’s helpful, but you would never in a million sweeps admit that the noise of your companions here, the footsteps and snippets of conversation, are all actually comforting. An almost soothing counterpoint to the voices in your head, the dead who have been quieter since the universes died or merged or whatever happened, but never, ever shut the everpitying fuck up.

  
It took almost a whole sweep to carefully round up the remnants of the bees, and assemble the servers. Another couple of perigees, and the labs were wired up for new purposes after everyone settled down a bit from worldbreaking fucking calamities and the clusterpail of impending maturity. Karkat had posited that if you were all going to become adults in this shitheap anyway, you should at least try to do so responsibly, and a loose plan was constructed. Unfortunately, that plan has little to do with you, directly. You upkeep the computers, but there’s little to upkeep after a while unless there’s a spat and someone’s husktop gets destroyed, or something decides to chew through the network wires. It’s a rarity that they find need for new software, new hardware, after the various setups are created.

  
So, you work on absorbing other programming languages from books that the cocky alien called Dave has given you and things you’ve dug up from online, but even this seems like grub's play after you've devoured the new syntaxes and data structures. You swim a _lot_ -among other things-with Feferi, and grow more than you ever fucking imagined you would.

  
Leaning back in your chair, the banks of server-hive radiating somnolent heat and the bees within humming softly, you look at the careful lines of code you have wrought in something called Java. It’s deceptively, simplistically close to spoken language, but oddly resilient because of that very fact. You've been writing a new game, as much to cement the language in your head as out of wanting something to do, and as a present for the group. Something fun and stupid that has absolutely no bearing on fates or realities or time travel, with pretty colours and cheerful music, Rose’s squids and TZ’s dragons. They both swear they’ve outgrown them, but you know it will at least make them all laugh. You’re almost excited about it, and actually can’t wait to see the reactions. Not that you’d admit this without at least a legislacerator at your throat.

  
There are footsteps outside your door. You're pretty good at identifying the others by how they approach; you got sensitive to these kinds of things after a late-night moulting fury drove Eridan to your room, soggy, jealous and naked and trying to strangle you with your own clothes, weeping over how you’d stolen his fated quadrant, the unbelievable asshole. But from the sound, it's nothing that dramatic, nor FF or KK, or any of the humans. Too bad; cheerful, unflappable Jade had promised a visit and some coffee at some point this evening. How did you ever manage your all-night coding sessions without coffee, you wonder, looking sadly at your empty receptacle, sniffing at the rich, dark residue. There was a machine, anyone could make it, but hers tended to actually be fucking delicious instead of the battery acid you produce. And she appreciates computers, loves your bees in a weird way.

  
A bone cracking stretch and a yawn, and when you sit back upright, you sight a misplaced left-carat, but your hands are not obeying you. Neither are your legs, or the rest of you for that matter. Your breathing sharpens, but before panic can completely set in, the screen spins out of your vision, and a warm weight settles in your lap, lithe and close, hands splayed across your chest. The shape chuckles, and you let out a hissing snarl. Vriska.

  
You pull against the tendrils she’s got in your mind, then push as hard as you can. But they’re as cleverly convoluted as she is, and you’re a witless fucking grublick for not noticing what she was doing before she’d caught you. Between what she’s done inside your head, and that it feels like she’s even warmer than your machines, you can’t focus, your mind swimming, drowsing. It’s difficult to think, let alone fight it, as she takes control of your hands, slides her own claws up under your shirt, mocking you all the while.

  
The moment of pain when she bites your ear, bright and sharp, clears you enough for focus, enough to gather your power, follow her tendrils out from where she found her way in and sever them viciously, dumping her onto the floor. She twitches and shudders with neural backlash, but there is no trace of remorse on her face. In fact, she’s fucking _laughing_?

  
“What the fuck, Vriska?” You let up just enough that she can answer.

  
“I wanted to see if you were as much of a limp fucking grubling as you seem. And I wanted to test myself against a real psionic." She looks up at you, eyes brilliant with defiance, with excitement.

  
“Are you seriously grubshit? I’m not your fucking stand-in caliginous masturbatory tool.” But your words are distracted; she’s fighting back, in a slithery, slippery fashion, nowhere near your match in strength, but her technique would be fascinating if you weren’t the one fending her off, small and sneaky and as sideways as her conversations are not. As you _are_ fending her off, however, you feel like you’re trying to pin a slitherbeast that’s been doused in grease. You feel your head fall back, and a long sigh begins to unwind as it occurs to you just how long this night is going to be.

 

Everything begins to slip away.


	3. Chapter 3

You open your eyes, and your room, your machines, your quiet fucking evening and any hope of coffee until this is finished are far, far away. She's sneaking illusions in under your radar now, and there is only the endless, steelblack Alternian sea, a scavenged ship, and Vriska in her stupid fucking pirate's hat and coat, and she’s grinning her mad razored grin. You’re standing out over the water on a wooden plank. A situation, if you remember rumours, that tends to end either in drowning, or in her very hungry lusus. It's a thorough illusion. You smell saltspray, a cold haze promising storms, feel a wind like ice-shards that your lab clothes are nowhere near sufficient for. You hunch against it and watch her warily, trying to decide a course of action.

  
“Surrender, and I'll be nice! Maybe you'll still have clothes on when the princess finds us together!”

  
“Cram your own bulge in your facehole!” She frowns, and a wave of psychic energy hits you, a tide of emotion. Fear, pain, confusion, the sensation of being very, very small and extraordinarily lost. The sky, the waves, the ship, her, all loom large and pitiless and you are so fucking far from home. ' _Oh shit_ ', you think. ' _She's got their memories. She's_ kept them, _all this time_.'

The wave of terror redoubles, taking advantage of your own confusion and horror at the idea of her storing all of this. You harbour no illusions about your race’s more brutal tendencies, and had your share of scars and blood on your hands from a young age, but this is different. It seems vastly uglier, somehow, to secret it away like this, to  _preserve_ these things, and it rolls over you. You feel your legs give way, barely able to keep from falling into the ocean below. Tears streaming down your face, you are a scant three sweeps again, and you are cornered by her, by the huge tealblood up your block- _two pairs of horns, huh? let's see what else he's got two of_ -by a threat you cannot pin down, that wears the face of every single terror you’ve encountered since. You curl up further, small and alone and wanting your hive, the electric hum of your bees, your matesprit-

 _-wait, your what_?  
\---

 He's crying. You can't believe it, he's curled into a fucking ball and weeping like a wriggler with nightmares as you weave thread upon thread of his memories and your own into this dreamtrap, so many layers of triggers like strings on an instrument, so easy to play on emotion like this when you hold something that mirrors it, that ignites what's there, like calling to like, fueling itself like a flame kindles a bonfire, setting off a grand fucking bomb. This is exceedingly interesting. ‘ _Maybe I really should take the name Mindfang. It's not hyperbole if I can take this little shit down so easily_.’

  
'... _He's standing again_?' He unfolds, face yellowed, breathing deeply as if to centre himself.

  
 “HEY. You backed-up fucking nookhat.” Both middle claws are in the air. “I'm not one of your kids! And FF- _the fucking seadweller empress in training_ -taught me to swim. You're going to have to try harder.” His dive off the plank is a perfect arc, and he disappears beneath the memory-waves. You snarl. Stupid Princess Fucking Squidbulge. Still. Maybe there's a new tactic, there, though.

A way to get back on top. So to speak.


	4. Chapter 4

Working on the illusion, trying to find the seams of it, you swim, and you continue to remind yourself it's an illusion, that you aren't lacking in the ability to breathe, here. It wouldn't do to drown in a fucking psychic maze-trap; that would be embarrassing. You don’t find a bottom to this ocean, nor a surface after some time, but under the ‘water’, the frigid temperatures and wind no longer seem to apply. So you swim, and you press against it, looking for a weak place, somewhere to break through and get back to yourself, your body.

  
It’s quiet enough here to think clearly, her psionics something like a filter to the din in your head. You try very hard not to fantasize all of the terrible things you’d like to do to Serket when you snap out of this. That would mean she had won, you reciprocating her advance like that. And _absolutely_ fuck that noise. Though there may be some interest to be had in turning it around on her in some way, it might be too much to ask for her to learn a thing...

  
“Sol-lux! What IS this? Where is your ROOM?”

  
“FF? Shit! What are you doing here?”

  
 “I came to find you for Ja-ade. She’s made a clam-is-ter of that stuff you like! It feels like I’m dream-ing?...and...you’re not drown-ing!” Her gills flare, and she cocks her head at you quizzically. You’re not certain how she got caught in this trap, but it certainly sounds like her, feels like her through whatever tangles your mind is caught up in.

  
 “It’s something that nooksniffer Vriska is doing. Not moon-dreaming like we’re used to, but an illusion, yes.” She snarls, all needle-teeth and royal fury, trailing off in a string of bubbled invective you can’t quite make out as she traces a tight spiral through the water-air like an agitated cephalopod. You’ve only learned enough of the seadweller tongue to realise that it would make Karkat’s finest and most colourful phrasing sound like a warbling grub’s first words. You are blushing despite yourself; it’s a side of her you’re not exactly surprised to find, especially not in this situation, but it’s still somewhat new. And strangely hot.

  
“I. What.” Oh, brilliant. Just fucking brilliant. And you’re supposed to be the one at the controls in this grubfuck mental kind of situation? She smirks a little, her expression otherwise cryptic, unreadable, then she wraps you in skinny, royalblood-strong arms, in a waving black seaweed-forest of hair, nips at your shoulder. “You know she’s probably watching us, right?”

  
 “I do not CA-ARE.” Her sharp face goes hungry, imperious, as she lets go, flows around you, forcing you to spin in place to follow her words. “I can have you in MY WORL-D for once. Come ON.”

  
She makes you chase her, and though you’ve been training with her, you aren’t bred for this like she is, a flickering of grey and black shot with magenta swimming circles around you. Laughing, she disappears as a particularly turbulent patch tips you upside down. You don’t know which way is up; there’s nothing more than darkness and water-patterned light as far as you can see, until you cannot see at all. Feferi’s webbed hands are over your eyes, she’s giggling and pressed against your back, legs wrapped around your waist and her pointed little chin on your head.

  
“This is _serious_ , FF.” But you’re not sure it is, or, really, if it should be anymore, not when FF’s so grubshit happy to have you in her territory, or a dream that is close enough to it. It’s like she’s got more hands than she should, and they’re all set to making your blood boil, and you’re goddamn _floating_ with her. You’ve done this in the pools, when you can kick fucking Eridan out for long enough for some quality time, but that is not this weightlessness, this utter lack of concern for petty troubles like air. The bitch wants a show? Maybe you’ll put on a fucking musical based on how little you care about her illusions, complete with songs _and_ dances and pretty sparkling lights, too. The thought of this, of her plots and endless blackflirt button-pushings amounting to not a thrice-fucked thing makes you smirk a little, as you peel off your shirt and begin to return Feferi’s attentions with as much fucking abandon as you can muster.


	5. Chapter 5

You’ve _got him_. You’ve _fucking_ got him. He’s thinking with his fucking bulge and he thinks you’re his mate and shit, you might just be a teensy bit jealous of Miss Fishpants right now. It’s like anything extraneous has been seared off his thin frame in a crucible, leaving only this purest essence of logic and stubbornness and fucking intensity wrapped around long, long bones, and all of it focused on you at this moment.

  
You keep him from drawing blood only by taking the aggressive stance, uncertain if you could keep the level of detail up for long, or if you could even get the hue right. When he tries to force the issue, to get leverage, you grasp him by the wrists, the throat, nip at his sharp clavicles and dart away- _he’s not the only motherfucker to be schooled by a seadweller_ -only to surprise him from behind, sliding fingers into the front of his pants, hips pinned together by your legs. He turns so that you are facing one another, hooks his fingers under your shirt and slides it off, eyes widening as he did so. Had he really not seen this yet?

  
“You know...” Long fingers stroke a promise up the middle of your chest, over sternum and clavicles, only to wrap around your throat and tighten. Your own hands jerk free as his expression goes sharp and feral in a completely different way, and his voice is the barest breath of sound, a venomous distillation. “FF’s gills aren’t fucking grey, they’re _her_ purple.”

  
Everything turns inside out, goes black.

  
It is a storm of black, each moment a discrete apocalypse, so many voices that you can’t think, can’t speak, can’t bear to add another to their din, you’d be part of their number and lost forever.

  
“IS THIS WHAT YOU WANT?” The words roar across the folds of your brain, cutting through the cacophony. This particular voice is his, completely psychic, and his diction here is clear as a fucking summons claxon piped through your bones. You don’t see him anywhere, you realise, because this is _all_ him. You’re in his head, now, and you feel all the spite draining from you in the face of the storm. “You wanted my fucking power, right? Well, here it fucking is, Vriska. Every screaming moment of my fucking existence.”

  
“I was only _playing_...I was bored.” You whisper.

  
 “You want this so fucking badly, I can keep you here. Forever. I’ve enough practice fucking closing them out, making them into background noise, what’s one more screaming voice? You’ll go catatonic, and I’ll tell everyone you ate the mind honey or something, another fucking stupid thing no one would be surprised you’d do. Your body would remain alive...”

  
 “...at least I think. That’s theory at this point.” This last is spoken, snarled, it echoes off of what sounds like real walls, real objects.

  
 You open your eyes, and you’re in his room again, on his floor. He’s sitting in front of you, head against the back of his computer chair and eyes slitted, still glowing red and blue in the shadows thrown by screenlight, teeth half bared. “I don’t hate you, Vriska, not for my own lack of attention to my surroundings. And you’re too much of a psychotic pain in the bulge for me to pity. But if you ever want to simply test our powers against one another? Ask like a civilized grubling, instead of this utter fuckery. I’d be curious now if I didn’t want so badly to crack your skull open like an egg for the good of this little community I’m _actually_ growing fond of. Now _get out_.”

  
You abscond.

\---

  
 ...She was fucking bored? That was _it_?

  
A deep breath helps some of the remaining adrenaline peter out, makes the shaking tolerable. Two more, and you can stand again. Your knees hurt like hell; they were scraped pretty badly when she sent you under, and it looks like your favourite pants may now have ventilation. It could have been worse. If you’d gone backwards instead, your brains might be festively decorating the outside of your ‘coon.

You sit back down at the computer, save your code, and begin trying to compose this space-rock’s longest fucking email, ever, to FF. An epic fucking poem in ancient verse, in fact, equal parts confession of your lack of attention in this, and all that it brought about, and venting the remainder of your incomprehending fury at her way of dealing with simply being bored. Some of you script games, some draw with and/or eat chalk, track everyone else’s relationships like a creepy fucking stalker, make distressing puppet porn or bake cookies. She...she fucking _what_?

  
Fuck it, you’ll write all of what you need to say after you find some more coffee.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> End.
> 
> I've made a few assumptions here; Vriska spent a lot of time hanging with/fighting with Eridan as a wee thing. I'm pretty sure that a) she'd be a hell of a swimmer by now, and b) she'd be keen to pick up a great deal of Seadweller profanity.
> 
> Also, I didn't feel like trying to write Sol's lisp. Writing it out is awkward and though it helps me reading it, it seems like others generally hate it.


End file.
